


Forgotten

by onstraysod



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, JediFest, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 08:39:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14281176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: He had one ambition, one desire. And for a fleeting, bloody moment, it was his.





	Forgotten

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightFell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightFell/gifts).



> Written for the _JediFest Alien April Treat Round_. This prompt was requested by nightfell.

There were ambitions thought more noble than his. But the moral judgments of the galaxy mattered not at all. His ambition was worthy simply _because_ it was his, the only one he’d ever had, and he treasured it like a jewel. A blood-red jewel with facet edges so sharp they sliced open his fingers every time he reached out to grasp it. But a jewel nonetheless.

He wanted to be feared. To watch the ruddy color of life drain from the faces of the sentients who encountered him, to see terror flash up into their eyes, pure and bright as a rising star. The nervous hush of dread that fell wherever he went was as music to his ears; the tremor of trepidation quickened his pulse with delight. The power to render the hardest, most craven spacer mute with dread, to make warrior species like Trandoshans grovel in their own spittle at his feet, was as intoxicating to him as glitterstim to lesser beings. It was his reason for drawing each new breath.

He had reached the zenith of this awesome power, just as his master had promised he would. First on a planet of sand and bony, barren dunes: he had brought a darkness the world’s binary suns could not dispel. Then on a paradise planet of water and greenery: the soft, pastoral world of his master’s birth, weak in its comfort and isolation. He had been the black shadow on the pastel canvas of that world, and with his red blades he’d spilled into its yielding soil a Jedi’s blood. The anguish in the other Jedi’s scream, the horror in his eyes, the rage that had made the young man wobble on the tightrope between the Light Side and the Dark: that had been his handiwork, too, and in that moment he had truly ascended and become (as his master had foreseen) like a god of old. The Dark had coursed through and around him, oscillating with the energy of a thousand pulsars, and he might have shattered the firmament of the world’s soft blue sky with a cry, might have crushed the system and all the life in it with one blow of his hand. He had been immortal in that moment, and all the galaxy had shuddered at the rumor of his name.

Then suddenly… all the fear and pain had been his. Falling, taken by blackness, no longer whole, his ambition had slipped from his grasp, winked out like a distant, dying star. Now he paces, wrapped in a cloak of noxious fumes and madness, on a rubbish heap of a planet, rusting bits of garbage in his walls and in his head. His companions in this misery are two: the wraith of his lost power, and the mocking voice of his master, an incessant drone in his ears. He lives ( _if you can call it living_ ), and he rages aloud to the garbage and to his master’s echo, and with his anger and his spidery, salvaged legs he is terrifying.

But he is alone.

And the galaxy has forgotten its fear of Darth Maul, the way a sleeper forgets his nightmare in the clear light of the dawn.


End file.
